The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield eBook

Perhaps the most annoying disturbance which ever came
into Booth’s theatrical life, and not a great
disturbance at that, was the jealousy which existed
between Wilks and himself. Wilks was impetuous,
bad tempered and crotchety, and it is possible that
the envy was, originally, rather of his own making.
But be that as it may, Booth suffered many a pang
from the successes of the more dashing Wilks, and
the latter never lost an opportunity of thwarting his
associate. We remember how the commonplace Mills
was pushed forward, with the idea of hiding the genius
of Barton, and Cibber refers more than once to this
short-sighted policy of Wilks. “And yet,
again,” he writes, “Booth himself, when
he came to be a manager, would sometimes suffer his
judgment to be blinded by his inclination to actors
whom the town seem’d to have but an indifferent
opinion of.” And thereupon Colley asks
“another of his old questions”—­viz.,
“Have we never seen the same passions govern
a Court! How many white staffs and great places
do we find, in our histories, have been laid at the
feet of a monarch, because they chose not to give
way to a rival in power, or hold a second place in
his favour? How many Whigs and Tories have changed
their parties, when their good or bad pretentions have
met with a check to their higher preferment?”

The fact is that there was never any artistic sympathy
between the two distinguished actors. Booth could
play comedy, and play it quite well, but his soul
was all for tragedy. On the other hand, while
Wilks knew how to tread the sombre paths of high drama
(he even made a creditable Hamlet), the comedian looked
with more regard upon his own peculiar vein of work,
the impersonation of the graceful, the genteel, and
the elegantly picturesque. In one way the latter
proved more generous than his rival. “It
might be imagin’d,” runs on Cibber, “from
the difference of their natural tempers, that Wilks
should have been more blind to the excellencies of
Booth than Booth was to those of Wilks; but it was
not so. Wilks would sometimes commend Booth to
me; but when Wilks excell’d the other was silent."[A]

[Footnote A: During Booth’s inability to
act ...Wilks was called upon to play two of his parts:
Jaffier and Lord Hastings in “Jane Shore.”
Booth was, at times, in all other respects except his
power to go on the stage, in good health, and went
among the players for his amusement. His curiosity
drew him to the playhouse on the nights when Wilks
acted these characters, in which himself had appeared
with uncommon lustre. All the world admired Wilks
except his brother manager: amidst the repeated
bursts of applause which he extorted, Booth alone
continued silent.—­DAVIES.]

But all these petty heartburnings and jealousies were
buried in the grave of Wilks. That incomparable
player, whose sprightliness seemed to defy the grim
tyrant, and who could act the lithesome youth upon
the stage even though he had to hobble to his hackney-coach
when the piece was ended, made his last exit in the
autumn of 1732. Booth followed on the same long
journey in the May of 1733, after an illness during
which the great patient was dosed with crude mercury,
bled, plastered, blistered, and otherwise helped onward
to his death. Verily, it is a wonder that the
physicians of old did not extinguish the whole human
race.